How much do you get back — and when — from a data protection strategy with appliance-based backup and deduplication? In many cases, it’s about more than just ROI. Faster recoveries obviously enhance operations and improve mission performance. But how do you quantify the impact of having more IT staff time for strategic projects? Or more time with your family? Here are six hard-to-quantify benefits of a successful data protection strategy.

1. IT becomes an engine to run the company

It’s a no brainer. Quick, granular recovery means you can match backup to your business. Take the example of Allergy Partners, the nation’s largest single allergy specialty medical practice. As part of a transition from paper to electronic medical records, it replaced its tape backups with a deduplication backup appliance and software to orchestrate automated backups. “IT has now become the engine that runs this company,” explains Deborah Scott, the company’s chief operating officer. “Every day, our physicians depend on EHR patient records, and our business relies on a lot of valuable financial data too.”

2. Knowing your data is there when you need it

“There are so many benefits that are hard to measure, such as having data readily available and knowing that it’s there when you need it,” says Marcia Henry, IT director at Allergy Partners. “We had to look at backup more along the lines of availability — consistent availability — rather than just backup.”

3. Curbing — and coping with — data growth

Allergy Partners is now able to deal with the challenges of exponential data growth. The cost of just 2TB of tape data averaged $90,000 annually for the organization. It took two days to perform a full backup. But the new data protection solution, using deduplication and compression technology, allows the company to curb data growth by reducing the amount of backup data that you need to store.

4. Complete nightly backups

By replacing its antiquated tape-based system with a purpose-built backup appliance, Allergy Partners can now perform complete, fast and reliable backups. “Instead of just going once every week or every few weeks with tape, we can now back up everything, every night, successfully,” notes Jason Reed, a senior engineer. “We have a full backup of all the data, and we also replicate it every night offsite to the second backup appliance.”

5. Senior engineers no longer play with backup tapes

Gone are the days when IT staff at Allergy Partners, including in senior engineers, used to manually execute, rotate and move backup tapes, a process that up to 20 hours a week to complete. They also used to manually search for specific data and label and store tapes.

6. More family time for IT staff

Last but not least, the IT team at Allergy Partners says that the time savings to senior engineers and other IT staff is so significant it actually helps them regain some valuable family time.

Read our e-book for more examples of how companies like yours have improved ROI as well as the harder-to-quantify results like these.